Colonel Starbottle's Client. Bret Harte
“if you don't remember.” He paused, then rising, he gloomily dragged his chair slowly beside the table, and taking up a paperweight examined it with heavy dissatisfaction. “You see,” he went on slowly, “I killed him—it was a quo'll. He was my pardner, but I reckon he must have drove me hard. Yes, sir,” he added with aggrieved reflection, “I reckon he drove me hard.”
The Colonel smiled courteously, slightly expanding his chest under the homicidal relation, as if, having taken it in and made it a part of himself, he was ready, if necessary, to become personally responsible for it. Then lifting his empty glass to the light, he looked at it with half closed eyes, in polite imitation of his companion's examination of the paper-weight, and set it down again. A casual spectator from the window might have imagined that the two were engaged in an amicable inventory of the furniture.
“And the—er—actual circumstances?” asked the Colonel.
“Oh, it was fair enough fight. THEY'LL tell you that. And so would HE, I reckon—if he could. He was ugly and bedev'lin', but I didn't care to quo'll, and give him the go-by all the time. He kept on, followed me out of the shanty, drew, and fired twice. I”—he stopped and regarded his hat a moment as if it was a corroborating witness—“I—I closed with him—I had to—it was my only chance, and that ended it—and with his own revolver. I never drew mine.”
“I see,” said the Colonel, nodding, “clearly justifiable and honorable as regards the code. And you wish me to defend you?”
The stranger's gloomy expression of astonishment now turned to blank hopelessness.
“I knew you didn't understand,” he said, despairingly. “Why, all THAT was TWO YEARS AGO. It's all settled and done and gone. The jury found for me at the inquest. It ain't THAT I want to see you about. It's something arising out of it.”
“Ah,” said the Colonel, affably, “a vendetta, perhaps. Some friend or relation of his taken up the quarrel?”
The stranger looked abstractedly at Starbottle. “You think a relation might; or would feel in that sort of way?”
“Why, blank it all, sir,” said the Colonel, “nothing is more common. Why, in '52 one of my oldest friends, Doctor Byrne, of St. Jo, the seventh in a line from old General Byrne, of St. Louis, was killed, sir, by Pinkey Riggs, seventh in a line from Senator Riggs, of Kentucky. Original cause, sir, something about a d——d roasting ear, or a blank persimmon in 1832; forty-seven men wiped out in twenty years. Fact, sir.”
“It ain't that,” said the stranger, moving hesitatingly in his chair. “If it was anything of that sort I wouldn't mind—it might bring matters to a wind-up, and I shouldn't have to come here and have this cursed talk with you.”
It was so evident that this frank and unaffected expression of some obscure disgust with his own present position had no other implication, that the Colonel did not except to it. Yet the man did not go on. He stopped and seemed lost in sombre contemplation of his hat.
The Colonel leaned back in his chair, fanned himself elegantly, wiped his forehead with a large pongee handkerchief, and looking at his companion, whose shadowed abstraction seemed to render him impervious to the heat, said:—
“My dear Mr. Corbin, I perfectly understand you. Blank it all, sir, the temperature in this infernal hole is quite enough to render any confidential conversation between gentlemen upon delicate matters utterly impossible. It's almost as near Hades, sir, as they make it—as I trust you and I, Mr. Corbin, will ever experience. I propose,” continued the Colonel, with airy geniality, “some light change and refreshment. The bar-keeper of the Magnolia is—er—I may say, sir, facile princeps in the concoction of mint juleps, and there is a back room where I have occasionally conferred with political leaders at election time. It is but a step, sir—in fact, on Main Street—round the corner.”
The stranger looked up and then rose mechanically as the Colonel resumed his coat and waistcoat, but not his collar and cravat, which lay limp and dejected among his papers. Then, sheltering himself beneath a large-brimmed Panama hat, and hooking his cane on his arm, he led the way, fan in hand, into the road, tiptoeing in his tight, polished boots through the red, impalpable dust with his usual jaunty manner, yet not without a profane suggestion of burning ploughshares. The stranger strode in silence by his side in the burning sun, impenetrable in his own morose shadow.
But the Magnolia was fragrant, like its namesake, with mint and herbal odors, cool with sprinkled floors, and sparkling with broken ice on its counters, like dewdrops on white, unfolded petals—and slightly soporific with the subdued murmur of droning loungers, who were heavy with its sweets. The gallant Colonel nodded with confidential affability to the spotless-shirted bar-keeper, and then taking Corbin by the arm fraternally conducted him into a small apartment in the rear of the bar-room. It was evidently used as the office of the proprietor, and contained a plain desk, table, and chairs. At the rear window, Nature, not entirely evicted, looked in with a few straggling buckeyes and a dusty myrtle, over the body of a lately-felled pine-tree, that flaunted from an upflung branch a still green spray as if it were a drooping banner lifted by a dead but rigid arm. From the adjoining room the faint, monotonous click of billiard balls, languidly played, came at intervals like the dry notes of cicale in the bushes.
The bar-keeper brought two glasses crowned with mint and diademed with broken ice. The Colonel took a long pull at his portion, and leaned back in his chair with a bland gulp of satisfaction and dreamily patient eyes. The stranger mechanically sipped the contents of his glass, and then, without having altered his reluctant expression, drew from his breast-pocket a number of old letters. Holding them displayed in his fingers like a difficult hand of cards, and with something of the air of a dispirited player, he began:—
“You see, about six months after this yer trouble I got this letter.” He picked out a well worn, badly written missive, and put it into Colonel Starbottle's hands, rising at the same time and leaning over him as he read. “You see, she that writ it says as how she hadn't heard from her son for a long time, but owing to his having spoken once about ME, she was emboldened to write and ask me if I knew what had gone of him.” He was pointing his finger at each line of the letter as he read it, or rather seemed to translate it from memory with a sad familiarity. “Now,” he continued in parenthesis, “you see this kind o' got me. I knew he had got relatives in Kentucky. I knew that all this trouble had been put in the paper with his name and mine, but this here name of Martha Jeffcourt at the bottom didn't seem to jibe with it. Then I remembered that he had left a lot of letters in his trunk in the shanty, and I looked 'em over. And I found that his name WAS Tom Jeffcourt, and that he'd been passin' under the name of Frisbee all this time.”
“Perfectly natural and a frequent occurrence,” interposed the Colonel cheerfully. “Only last year I met an old friend whom we'll call Stidger, of New Orleans, at the Union Club, 'Frisco. 'How are you, Stidger?' I said; 'I haven't seen you since we used to meet—driving over the Shell Road in '53.' 'Excuse me, sir,' said he, 'my name is not Stidger, it's Brown.' I looked him in the eye, sir, and saw him quiver. 'Then I must apologize to Stidger,' I said, 'for supposing him capable of changing his name.' He came to me an hour after, all in a tremble. 'For God's sake, Star,' he said—always called me Star—'don't go back on me, but you know family affairs—another woman, beautiful creature,' etc., etc.—yes, sir, perfectly common, but a blank mistake. When a man once funks his own name he'll turn tail on anything. Sorry for this man, Friezecoat, or Turncoat, or whatever's his d——d name; but it's so.”
The suggestion did not, however, seem to raise the stranger's spirits or alter his manner. “His name was Jeffcourt, and this here was his mother,” he went on drearily; “and you see here she says”—pointing to the letter again—“she's been expecting money from him and it don't come, and she's mighty hard up. And that gave me an idea. I don't know,” he went on, regarding the Colonel with gloomy doubt, “as you'll think it was much; I don't know as you wouldn't call it a d——d fool idea, but I got it all the same.” He stopped, hesitated, and went on. “You see this man, Frisbee or Jeffcourt, was my pardner. We were good friends up to the killing, and then he drove me hard. I think I told you he drove me